Leading the Coastal Commission for 25 Years, a Crusader and Lightning Rod

Big Sur, just north of Lucia.Credit
Jeff Pflueger for The New York Times

Peter Douglas has survived Nazi Germany, throat cancer, accidentally setting himself on fire, and what he counts as 11 efforts to unseat him in his quarter-century as executive director of the California Coastal Commission.

The question now is whether both Mr. Douglas, 67, and the 12-member commission can weather the state’s next budget and continue enforcing the 1976 Coastal Act, whose work has helped keep one of the world’s most beautiful coastlines largely undeveloped.

Mr. Douglas said he was deeply concerned that an item in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget could limit the agency’s access to legal services supplied by the attorney general, calling the plan “the greatest threat to the integrity of the Coastal Act since it was passed.”

The commission, based in San Francisco, is one of the nation’s most powerful — and litigious — land-use authorities.

Yet even some critics say its budget has perennially been inadequate to fulfill its broad mandate: to protect 1.5 million acres along 1,100 miles of coastline. In recent years, the commission’s enforcement backlog has grown to 1,500 cases, a situation that Mr. Douglas and his staff attribute to insufficient personnel. The staff numbers about 125 today, down from a high of 212 in 1980.

“Any day of the week, the offices look like there has just been an outbreak of anthrax,” said David Weinsoff, a public interest lawyer in the Bay Area.

Pending complaints include problems like blocked access to public beaches, illegally filled wetlands and the construction of homes, swimming pools and even golf courses without the required permits.

The new budget could effectively cap the commission’s annual legal expenses, which Mr. Douglas said could force him to choose between pursuing violators and making further budget cuts to underwrite legal action.

Moreover, he said, the commission for the first time would have to get the approval for new litigation from the governor’s Office of Finance, effectively giving politicians a “veto power” over its actions.

Linda Likar, an international sustainability consultant and former World Bank economist who has studied the commission, argued that the potential cut in legal support was “a pernicious way” to weaken the agency.

But Aaron McLear, a spokesman for Mr. Schwarzenegger, said the proposal was intended to apply to several other agencies, too, including the State Lands Commission.

And Norbert Dall, a land-use consultant in Sacramento who frequently works with the commission, said that while he thought the agency was “ridiculously underfunded,” he did not object to spending limits for what he characterized as unessential litigation.

The controversy is emblematic of Mr. Douglas’s long stint as executive director. While his many admirers depict him as an environmental hero, critics suggest that he needs to pick his battles.

“Few people in California have made as many enemies as Douglas,” The Capitol Weekly noted recently.

State Senator Denise Moreno Ducheny, a Democrat who is chairwoman of the budget committee, said of Mr. Douglas: “He often doesn’t choose to work with people. He just wants to tell you, which doesn’t make him a lot of friends.”

Mr. Douglas in many ways personifies the spirit of the early years of the grass-roots environmental movement that helped give birth to the Coastal Commission via a statewide voters’ referendum. With a graying beard and a bolo tie, he calls himself a “radical pagan heretic,” and he has been known to interrupt drives along the coast to stand in front of bulldozers operating without a permit.

Photo

Peter Douglas, in his office as executive director of the California Coastal Commission, is committed to keeping the coastline in its natural state.Credit
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

His values reflect those embraced by his home county, Marin, including a reverence for natural landscapes and functioning farmland — and an antipathy toward development that might alter them.

His powers of endurance, both personal and professional, are legendary. Born in Berlin, he fled the Nazis with his family when he was a child. In 2006, two years after recovering from Stage 4 cancer, Mr. Douglas set a match to a pile of dead leaves he had doused with gasoline, setting off an explosion that sent him flying. He has recovered from the serious burns.

Mr. Douglas is strongly identified with his agency in part because he was a co-author of both the ballot initiative that created it and the 1976 law making the agency permanent.

The quasi-judicial agency is uniquely powerful, with a jurisdiction that overlaps those of city, state and federal authorities, and uniquely independent. The governor, State Senate and State Assembly each appoint one-third of the commission members. Mr. Douglas serves at their pleasure.

During his tenure, the commission has moved forcefully on several fronts of its mandate, which includes limiting coastal construction, ensuring public access to beaches and having a say in the regulation of offshore drilling.

Over the years, commission actions have helped create thousands of acres of parklands and public trails and preserve much of Highway 1 as a two-lane road weaving through farmland, rocks and empty dunes.

Steve Blank, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who serves on the commission, called Mr. Douglas “the world’s best bureaucratic street fighter.”

Yet Mr. Dall and others argue that he has picked unnecessary fights with small property owners at the expense of broader planning to avert erosion and haphazard development.

A San Mateo County Superior Court judge ruled last month that the commission had acted unlawfully in insisting that a Half Moon Bay resident who was seeking a permit to build a 6,500-square-foot house on agricultural land devote most of the 140 surrounding acres to farming or grazing.

“They were out of line,” said the owner, Dan Sterling, adding that his children would have been prevented from ever subdividing the property.

Mr. Douglas countered that the commission might appeal the judge’s ruling, adding that “it would be foolish of us” to allow conversion of agricultural land at a time of increasing concerns about local food supplies.

Mr. Douglas’s most consistent opposition has come from the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, which has spent an average of $500,000 annually in recent years on what it calls its Coastal Land Rights Project. The foundation, based in Sacramento, accuses the agency of violating property owners’ rights and unconstitutionally confiscating their assets by insisting on unreasonable concessions in return for development rights.

Among other cases, the foundation is backing an appeal to the California Supreme Court by a Gualala community group frustrated in its effort to stage a 15-minute fireworks display on the Sonoma County coastline. Mr. Douglas said the fireworks would have scared away nesting birds.

Two lawyers affiliated with the foundation appear in a new documentary-style movie “Sins of Commission,” which was written and directed by Richard Oshen. The film, which has not been distributed, features a long line of frustrated lawyers, real estate agents, architects and property owners, and portrays the commission as an all-powerful enforcer that can “strike the fear of God” into property owners.

In light of the commission’s personnel issues, however, some environmental groups find such depictions off base. “If you’re a developer, the risk of enforcement is similar to winning the Lotto,” said Mark Gold, president of Heal the Bay, a Santa Monica group.

Mr. Douglas said he was not troubled by controversy. (“I follow the law, and it’s a very strong law,” he said.) Nor does he have plans to stop. The job has no mandatory retirement age, and there is no obvious successor in the wings — a state of affairs that worries some supporters.

“Once he’s gone, this commission will implode in the blink of an eye,” Mr. Blank said, “and all we’ll be talking about is the color of the concrete used to pave over what’s left of the coast.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 9, 2010, on page A25A of the National edition with the headline: Leading the Coastal Commission for 25 Years, a Crusader and Lightning Rod. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe